Parabola
by Consuelo Higdon
Summary: /Quickshot/ Cosmos goes to the outskirts of the city to try and get back in touch with lost memories. Beachcomber ends up finding him, and starts to think on how they got there. /TFA. More or less Fluff. Beachcomber Cosmos/


Beachcomber had found Cosmos leaning on a satellite.

Beachcomber hadn't been worried about him or anything. Beachcomber rarely ever worried about Cosmos very much when he wandered off. If he didn't think it was safe he wouldn't have gone in the first place. And if he did think it wasn't safe, but he still wanted to look through it, he'd tell him and they'd go into whatever it was together.

The only difference this time was that Cosmos had been rummaging through tons and tons of canvases inside Wreck-Gar's abandoned-looking warehouse earlier that day, searching for some sort of specific thinggimawhatsit. When he had found it, it turned out to just be one really big piece of paper. Beachcomber hadn't hesitated to ask him about it.

"What'cha gonna do with that, li'l man?" Cosmos had jerked his head up at him, apparently forgetting he was there. Beachcomber didn't hold it against him, but there was something odd in his mannerisms this day.

"Oh, uh, nothing. I just wanted to use this." Cosmos finally explained, staring at the blank paper with a far-off expression Beachcomber hadn't seen on him before.

"Whaddaya gonna use it for?" Wreck-gar had walked behind Cosmos by this point, leaning down a bit to get closer to his eye-level; Cosmos always was a pretty short little thing. He only looked at Wreck-Gar for a moment before looking at the paper again.

"It's an experiment." He merely said, putting on some sort of face to hide something or other that was bothering him. Beachcomber had been with Cosmos far too long not to notice that something was bothering him, but he just didn't know what. He probably should have addressed it earlier, because what ended up happening later that fine afternoon apparently led Cosmos all the way to the outskirts of the city, where the satellites were stationed.

The stars were already out by the time Beachcomber had found him. His internal clock told him that it was sometime after 8:30, with the warm summer air and persistent yellow glow near the bottom of the sky clearly marking that night time was about them. Beachcomber had momentarily begun to think up how to word hi questions, how to ask Cosmos what he was doing without sounding nosy or disciplinary. He had begun, but he never got the chance, because when he got there Cosmos was asleep.

Beachcomber stared at the small 'bot for a moment, before he turned his attention to the junk in front of him. There was the big piece of paper he had gotten earlier, he noted, plus a pen Cosmos had gotten from who knows where. Cosmos had always had a way of finding really big things, including the very box Beachcomber was occasionally forced to use to put him in when he did something he really shouldn't have. But other than that (and a regular-sized box of crayons), not much seemed to have gone on in the time Cosmos was out of Beachcomber's sight.

Keeping his eyes on the sparkling, Beachcomber sat down alongside him, resting his own back against the structure for the satellite as well. He took one good long look at the sky, focusing on the last few changes made before the odd red glow of the night sky came over them. Beachcomber still couldn't figure out why the sky was red at night, but he didn't worry too much about it.

Cosmos made a strange little grunting sound, and then fidgeted a little, leaning against Beachcomber after apparently realizing he was there. Beachcomber shifted a bit and put his arm around Cosmos's shoulders, more or less resting it on his back kibble. The movement prompted Cosmos to wiggle a little in response, eventually settling on a position attempting to bury his domed head into Beachcomber's belly. For all intents and purposes, it was completely adorable.

He didn't wake from his stasis-nap, though, apparently governing on other subconscious sensors of some kind. Or not. Beachcomber didn't know what went down in his pretty little head (and it was very small and cute indeed). It was even harder when the poor little thing had amnesia.

Beachcomber looked again at the piece of paper in front of them, sliding it closer to him with his foot and eventually getting it close enough to hold in his hand. He didn't see if anything was drawn on it earlier, but a closer look betrayed that Cosmos had in fact scribbled a _ton_ onto the small piece of paper.

A majority of it seemed to be odd sorts of notes, apparently comparing a star chart that he vaguely recognized to a little scribble of the Galaxy. Also scribbled seemingly randomly across the page were notes on the "rough relative astronomical distance of each of the stars" with an arrow pointing towards the doodle of the galaxy, a small "guide on three dimensional perceptions" (which was more or less a graph-like thingy with crayon lines on it and a cube symbol etched in the center), and a few other things that he had a hard believing were written by Cosmos. But he had read Cosmos' handwriting before, and this was definitely a carbon copy of the way his little protoform wrote.

He stared at Cosmos' domed head once again, his large servo now bent and resting on Beachcomber's belly. It tickled a little, but as long as he didn't breathe he'd be fine (he didn't need to breathe anyway). He scrutinized the paper afterwards, trying to make sense of all the big words and broken grammar that usually peppered a page of notes. Knowing Cosmos, most of the notes were not made in any proper, readable order, making it difficult to follow his train of thought throughout the page.

"Where didja learn all this?" Beachcomber asked Cosmos, not expecting him to answer. This baffled him rather more than usual, and Cosmos baffled him quite a few times. There were many-a-time when someone made an astronomical euphemism of some kind and Cosmos would take it literally, answering the rhetorical question seriously and with amazing aptitude.

Perhaps Cosmos' previous function (before he developed amnesia) was somewhere in the astronomy field? Beachcomber wouldn't know—he could barely remember a handful of names, let alone the functions and hobbies of most of the people back on Cybertron. His memory was downright terrible, but that was just the way it was. He had gotten himself this way anyways, so it made perfect sense that karma would take away most of the functions of his memory core.

Beachcomber shook his head. There was no use dwelling on past lives. When Beachcomber and Cosmos met, both of their lives had turned upside down, but if you asked him it was only for the better. Cosmos may have had most, if not all of his original memories deleted by accident, but if he hadn't then he wouldn't have been placed in Beachcomber's care (he had caused the issue in the first place). And if Cosmos hadn't been placed in Beachcomber's care, he would never have quit all those, as the humans would call them, 'drugs and mind-warpers' that had more or less completely fried his processor. And if he had never quit those drugs, he never would have managed to push Cosmos to go off-planet with him, to travel the stars that he was named after.

And if they had never travelled the stars, they never would have learned to love each other as much as they did.


End file.
